Program For The Future: The Commons as a collective intelligence meta-innovation

Program for the Future
A Summit & Workshop on Collective Intelligence
2008-12-09
The Commons as a collective intelligence meta-innovation
Mike Linksvayer
Creative Commons
Photo by asadal · Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 · http://flickr.com/photos/68242677@N00/2117153416/

Creative Commons .ORG
Nonprofit organization, launched to public December 2002
HQ and ccLearn in San Francisco
Science Commons division at MIT
~60 international jurisdiction projects, coordinated from Berlin
Foundation, corporate, and individual funding
Born at Stanford, supported by Silicon Valley

Enabling Reasonable Copyright
Space between ignoring copyright and ignoring fair use & public good
Legal and technical tools enabling a “Some Rights Reserved” model
Like “free software” or “open source” for content/media
But with more restrictive options
Media is more diverse and at least a decade(?) behind software

Six Mainstream Licenses

Lawyer Readable

Human Readable

Machine Readable <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"> <License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nl/"> <permits rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Reproduction"/> <permits rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Distribution"/> <requires rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Notice"/> <requires rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Attribution"/> <prohibits rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/ns#CommercialUse"/> <permits rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/ns#DerivativeWorks"/> <requires rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/ns#ShareAlike"/> </License> </rdf:RDF>

Machine Readable (Work)
 My Book by <a rel=" cc:attributionURL " property=" cc:attributionName " href=" http://example.org/me "> My Name </a> is licensed under a <a rel=" license " href=" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ " >Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License</a>. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at <a rel=" cc:morePermissions " href=" http://example.com/revenue_sharing_agreement ">example.com</a>.

DRMfree “ DRM Voodo” by psd licensed under CC BY 2.0 http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1806247462/

In Innovation, Meta is Max
“The max net-impact innovations, by far, have been meta-innovations, i.e., innovations that changed how fast other innovations accumulated.”
Robin Hanson (Economist)
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/meta-is-max---i.html

Collective Intelligence
Meta innovation?

Commons
Meta innovation for Collective Intelligence?

$2.2 trillion
Value of fair use in the U.S. Economy
http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/publish/news/First-Ever_Economic_Study_Calculates_Dollar_Value_of.shtml also see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7643

Cyber terrorism (Cyber terror war on) Privacy breaches Loss of Generativity Lock-in Surveillance DRM Censorship Suppression of innovation Electoral fraud

Threat categories
Legitimate security issues
Protectionism
Politics and power
Security theater and fear-based responses (driven by all of above, not just legitimate security issues)

What digital freedoms needed for beneficial collective intelligence?
Keep same rights online/digitally that we (should anyway) have offline/IRL
Permit innovation and participation enabled by digital world even if not possible before (probably follows from above)

How building the commons (free software, free culture, and friends) helps

Security
Data shows FLOSS is more secure
Security through obscurity doesn’t work
FLOSS encourages a heterogeneous computing environment
Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM and other mechanisms that sacrifice security to other goals

Protectionism
Peer production undermines policy arguments for protecting knowledge industries
Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM

Politics and power
Free software and culture improve transparency
... and the ability of all to participate
Peer production works against concentrated power — doesn’t require concentrated production structures and lowers barriers to entry

Security theater and fear
Access to facts mitigates fear and allows rational evaluation of responses
Commons work against three previous threats that drive security theater and fear

Can the success of the (digital) commons alter how we view freedom and power generally?

“The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.”
Eben Moglen

“If we don’t want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others.”
Richard Stallman

i.e., we can form collective intelligences instead of forced collectives ... and still “change the world”

Building the commons is key to the future of collective intelligence
Politicians and corporations are unimaginative ... they need to see solutions, or they react in fear
A dominant commons makes many collective stupidity scenarios much less likely
Beneficial collective intelligence needs universal access to culture, educational resources, research ... in machine-readable form

Much less Meta ... 2 of the excellent bootstrap(?) tools CC uses and builds
Semantic MediaWiki ... turn your MediaWiki into a database and database application platform
RDFa ... bridging the Semantic Web and the Web we all use

License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Attribution
Author: Mike Linksvayer
Link: http://creativecommons.org
Questions?
[email_address]
Detail of image by psd · Licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 · http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1805374441

Program For The Future: The Commons as a collective intelligence meta-innovation

by Mike Linksvayer

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